Framed – a FrameAway mini-review

I mentioned in Image is Everything that one of things I frequently do is crop photographs and artwork. For me this is a regular task because I need to find ways of keeping old and over-used photos as fresh as possible. Yes, I know there are limits to this, and my team is on track to get this addressed as the new year rolls around, but for now it’s a must.

You might also recall that I really like the compositional grids in the crop tools in Acorn and Pixelmator.

Well, I just found a great little tool called FrameAway.

Essentially this app creates a compositional grid overlay over any application window and then using a simple Control-Command-T shortcut you can work directly with the application under the grid.

So you can open a photo, bring up FrameAway, drag a compositional grid, position it, invoke the key command then use your app’s crop tool to make the crop.

Pretty cool, but do you need it if you’re already using Acorn or Pixelmator? Maybe not, though FrameAway does offer some alternative grids as well as the Rule of Thirds (which are used by both Pixelmator and Acorn) including: Golden Thirds, Nautilus Spiral, and two variants of Golden Diagonal. You can also create and add your own grids using Lua. I haven’t tried this yet but I could imagine being useful if you needed a special grid for your publishing work or something. Or just fun to goof around with. There are three already at FrameAway’s plugin site.

There’s no reason to limit your use to cropping assistance. You can use it to help you compose layouts and artwork too.

FrameAway has a single Inspector (in the HUD style) which displays the work through toggle command, Frame Type menu, Aspect Ratio menu and a selection size read-out. Preferences is a dead-simple control for the colour and opacity (labelled as ‘Alpha’) of the area outside of the selection. Help sends you to the workflow page at the FrameAway website which is clear and useful.

Nice touches include a Command-U shortcut that toggles through various measurement units (pixels, inches and mm), Simple key-strikes to rotate or flip the frame, and to toggle through frame types. Sparkle is here too for updates.

You need to license the app to access Preferences and make the shareware stuff disappear.

For me, cropping all day long, the price is measly (18.55CAD) and the transaction easily handled through Kagi (which give you a PayPal option).

Rough Edges? Sure, but they’re really minor. Use the word Opacity instead of Alpha. Refer to the Command key as Command not Mac, especially now that the Apple is gone and it wasn’t ever Mac to begin with. Trying to connect to the Kagi store from within the app didn’t work for me, but going to the FrameAway site and clicking ‘Buy a license’ worked just great.

If you’re a designer or photographer, and your current tools don’t have compositional grids, then this is a super app to add to your arsenal.

Linkage

FrameAway
Goodbye Apple, hello command
Lua